New HCA headquarters to create 1,000 new jobs

Artist rendering of the two, 20-story buildings proposed for the new HCA headquarters.

Mayor Karl Dean, Gov. Bill Haslam and HCA at Thursday's announcement.

NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) -

Mayor Karl Dean, Gov. Bill Haslam and Hospital Corporation of America announced Thursday that the company will build a new headquarters on West End Avenue, creating hundreds of new jobs for the area.

The $200 million development will be located at the West End Summit development and consist of two 20-story towers.

In total, the buildings will have 900,000 square feet of office space, with each one almost the size of the Pinnacle building downtown.

For the past five years, the West End Summit has been a symbol of an economy as stagnant as the water inside its big excavation hole at 1600 West End Ave., but soon Nashville's big eyesore will be transformed.

The facility is expected to employ a total of 2,000 people once completed by 2017 with an average salary of $85,000 a year.

"Growth in these important sectors of the health care economy are robust, and this will be the headquarters for making all of that happen," said HCA CEO Richard Bracken.

Construction at the site is scheduled to start early next year, and HCA plans to start a lease of the office space in March 2015.

"They are on a very ambitious time frame. They want these buildings built and they need to get into them," Dean said.

As for the water-filled hole, it shouldn't be there for much longer.

"The water will be being pumped out very shortly," Dean said.

Parallon Business Solutions will relocate 750 jobs to Nashville from Williamson County with plans to add about 800 to its workforce.

This project is believed to be the largest number of new permanent jobs created by one economic development project in Davidson County since the relocation of Dell's facilities to Nashville in the 1990s, and one of the largest in the region's history.

"HCA could have gone out of state for these headquarters but instead chose to grow jobs here in Nashville. This project speaks volumes about the vitality of our West End corridor, the talent of our workforce and the vibrancy of our city," Dean said.

Both the city and the state are offering incentive packages to HCA for expanding in Nashville.

The city will offer HCA a 15-year property tax abatement contingent on meeting certain job growth requirements. It will also give the company $500 per new employee and per employee it moves to Nashville from outside the county.

There's also an additional $1 million grant.

The plan is to get this incentive package to the Metro council for approval sometime in November.

"This is home for us, and I'll say it now: we don't want to go anywhere else. We never wanted to go anywhere else," Bracken said.

The state will chip in $7,500 per new employee, which will be paid to the company when it actually hires the person. That will total about $7.5 million.

The governor said it was an easy decision when you are talking about such sought-after jobs.

"The truth is not all jobs are created equal, and these are jobs that are going to average near six-figures with highly technical jobs and just the kind of jobs any state or city would want," Haslam said. "This is a game-changing project for a company that's been a game changer for Tennessee and Middle Tennessee for a long time."

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